“Cupboard Memories” by Xia Boqian

In Cupboard Memories the Chinese artist Xia Boqian merge together two projects; Out of the closet, where she have covered for a long time people with depression, mental issues due to events and way of life they didn’t wanted to share publicly. This project “out of the closet” also covered people suffering of what they are but can’t change; lesbians/gays, fat, suicidal, harassed, bullied, etc… For the edit of the book this project has been mixed with other “lighter” secrets; hidden feelings, sentimental affairs, secret love… to make a compilation of private moments with quite improvised stages. What was important during the shooting was to let go and she captured only few pictures of these moments, instantly, without taking care of “professional standard” (lighting, framing,…) She captured the moments.

The emotions frozen in time are much more valuables as during the preparation of the book, a lot of the archives where irremediably lost, leaving us in doubt about using old scans or previous internet sharing. But it was the story of the book itself: a compilation of imperfect things and moments, that cannot be repeated, so we kept going forward.

The sequencing was made using the idea of mutual needs: flowers, waters & human connections responding to each others.